I've always loved journaling but until beginning of this year haven't been very consistent at it. However in early January I decided to start writing every single day hoping to get over a writer's creative block that has been with me basically since high school. To help myself get through the block I'd get up an hour earlier than usual every morning and write my "morning pages", Julia Cameron Artist's Way style. Every morning I would write down three longhand pages of random ideas and thoughts, stream of consciousness style. I fell in love with the process not only because I already enjoyed journaling but also because it helped me de-cluttter overly active mind and start the day fresh and less stressed. The process also brought me a lot of insights and helped me get more connected with my creative process as an artist. At just a few week into my journaling adventure, in early February I made my first awkward attempts at "actual writing".

My writing was messy, fragmented, lacking in structure and it made me think that intuitive painting I've been practicing for years had somehow rewired my brain and that I was writing in the very same way I paint: freely, spontaneously, letting things to happen, stream of consciousness style and always in the flow. But I enjoyed writing anyways and kept on doing it every day regardless of objectively sucking at it, I simply fell in love with the process itself not expecting any meaningful or interesting results. I just kept on writing not even reading what I have put down to paper afterwards.

However, this weekend I thought it would be nice to finally read journals written over the last four months. As I begun to go through one of the notebooks from early January I noticed I still had two pieces of big paper up on the wall that I forgot to take down. I put them up to protect the wall from getting stained with ink while painting.

wall being nice and protected while working on the painting...

So, completely spontaneously I started to write down random notes from my journal, taken out of context, it just felt like a fun thing to down. I also set up my camera and begun to take pictures of the process (later I made a short stop-motion clip of it), it was amusing to layer random sentences, phrases and words on top of each other creating an abstract texture (hey, I really do write the way I paint!). It was also interesting to take notice of which thoughts I was choosing to put down on paper, I kept repeating a lot of same ideas and notions. The whole thing turned out to be an insightful experiment and exercise in creativity for sure. I ended the experiment by writing down: But if I let my heart win it will lead me to you.

Variations of those words kept popping up in my journals over and over again (I even illustrated something similar few weeks ago) so it felt fitting to write them in capital letters over the rest of the text.

All in all it was a fun exercise and even though I will probably never be a writer I'd love to continue experimenting with words and somehow incorporating them into my paintings.